Why You Should Keep Your Work Email - Especially In California

Welcome back to another episode of Cappuccino Chat. This time we're talking about why you should keep your emails, especially in California. All right, so this time we're talking about why we should be keeping our work emails, especially here in California where some of the HR laws and employment laws are the most stringent in the country. And that's really what the heart of this is, is with all the legal stuff that's going on with employment law and stuff like that, we need to make sure that we're capturing and retaining those business emails just to protect your business. So, this one's a little bit different this time on Cappuccino Chat, but I wanted to make sure I get this information out. If you're not paying attention to the different employment law, monthly, yearly, those kinds of things, please make sure to, you know, do your due diligence and look those up. If you have legal counsel when it comes to these matters, please get with them on what I'm about to discuss with you so that they can give you specific uh instructions on what you should keep, need to keep, for how long, those kinds of things. So, why email retention matters? It's um again, it's to protect your company, right? So, we want to make sure that if there's any other kind of discrimination or harassment claims being made, again, you have those in writing. If it's being done over email, uh going back and forth with the employ um employee, if you're doing it in person, legal counsel is probably going to say you need to take some notes, have each person sign something, those kinds of things. Um if there's any kind of wrongful termination suits, wage or hourly disputes, uh whistleblower complaints, um retaliation allegations. These are some reasons. Um big thing about why why retain some of these things especially after employees leave is um employees for certain things they have like years to file a complaint after they leave your business. So for instance harassment or discrimination they have up to four years to file a claim. Uh unpaid wages four years. Uh wrongful termination two years. And whistleblower claims three years. So these are just a couple of examples, but again this is why we need to keep those things. So if you are terminating an employee, um something going on, make sure you set up these rules and policies within your business so that you retain these emails to protect yourself later on. We want to make sure that that is all done for you and that it's not going to cause you issues later. So, save emails about, you know, hiring, firing, discipline, complaints, time off or pay issues. Um, and if a complaint is made, don't delete any emails, right? So, make sure you keep those. Maybe create a special folder file within your email. Uh, maybe we need to archive those off into a dedicated file that's stored and backed up somewhere. Those types of things. Um, so you want to make sure you're training key staff, so your HR department, any managers on legal risks and retention. Um, sometimes you can automate the archiving of these things. So again, once you get going back and forth, you can set up a rule to autoarchchive email coming from this person with this kind of subject line if you're got a conversation go so it archives automatically for you. um you want to maybe apply litigation holds. There's a way of doing that within Office 365 to um do some safeguarding to accounts when there's something like that coming up. And then just review things regularly. Audit. So again, is HR keeping these things? How are they keeping? How are they storing them? How are they ensured they're being backed up and maintained just in case something ever happens to you in the future? and then going back in and cleaning things up after those retention periods. Right? Again, I'm not a lawyer. You want to check with your legal counsel, but if the data isn't there, it's difficult, right? You don't want to get yourself in trouble for not keeping it. But at the same point, if you're required to keep it for four years, well then as soon as that four years is up, delete it. Get rid of it. So, you've kept it for your legal requirements. Now you can remove it cuz again if it's if all of a sudden they file suit or somebody wants to see something five, six, seven years later, you can tell them, hey look, we deleted it because we only had to legally keep it for four years, right? You're not going to get yourself in trouble. Again, always check with your legal counsel on these things. So, if you have any questions about this, uh, as it comes to kind of maybe just some general hygiene to your email, how to create folders, where to store things, how to create archive files, those kinds of things, feel free to reach out to us. As far as the legal requirements go, again, please reach out to your legal counsel. So, if you have any questions, you can reach us at 760-770-5200. [Music]